The Challenge: The company needs to move 20 to 25 terabytes of data to tape at least once a week from the servers at its Minneapolis headquarters, but the existing infrastructure has been barely able to complete a full backup within 24 hours.

How He Accomplished It: based on those backup needs, Johnson and his team decided it was most cost-effective to move to faster and higher-capacity Linear Tape Open (LTO) drives in Carlson's two StorageTek L700 libraries rather than make a wholesale replacement with a larger system. "We just couldn't justify the leap," Johnson says.

Project Details: Replacing the 40 Quantum Digital Linear Tape (DLT) 7000 drives (which the manufacturer has discontinued) in the L700 libraries with eight IBM Ultrium LTO 2 drives. Initiated last July, the project is scheduled to be completed by the end of March.